Jack Nicholson did not want to go to the Oscars. It was 1976 and he was nominated for best actor in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The Miloš Forman film, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a nationwide theatrical re-release on July 13 and July 16, had become a bit of a sensation — the second highest grossing picture of 1975, behind “Jaws,” and had received nine Oscar nominations.
But Nicholson wasn’t feeling optimistic. In five years, he’d already been nominated five times. He’d also lost five times. And he told his producer, Michael Douglas, that he couldn’t go through it again.
“I remember how hard I had to persuade Jack to come to the ceremony. He was so reluctant, but we got him there,” Douglas said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “And then of course we lost the first four awards. Jack was sitting right in front of me and sort of leaned back and said ’Oh, Mikey D, Mikey D, I told you, man.’ I just said, ‘Hang in there.’”
Douglas, of course, was right. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” would go on to sweep the “big five” — screenplay, director, actor, actress and picture — the first film to do so in 41 years, (“It Happened One Night,” in 1934) which only “The Silence of the Lambs” has done since. That night was one of many vindicating moments for a film that no one wanted to make or distribute that has quite literally stood the test of time.
“This is my first 50th anniversary,” Douglas said. “It’s the first movie I ever produced. To have a movie that’s so lasting, that people get a lot out of, it’s a wonderful feeling. It’s bringing back a lot of great memories.”
The film adaption of Ken Kesey’s countercultural novel was a defining moment for Douglas, a son of Hollywood who was stuck in television and got a lifeline to film when his father, Kirk Douglas, gave him the rights to the book, and many of the then-unknown cast like Danny DeVito and Christopher Lloyd.
DeVito was actually the first person officially cast. Douglas, who’d known him for nearly 10 years, brought Forman to see him play Martini on stage.
“Miloš said, ‘Yes! Danny! Perfect! Cast!’ Douglas said in his best Czech accent. “It was a big moment for Danny. But I always knew how talented he was.”
Though the film's themes are challenging, unlike many of its New Hollywood contemporaries it wasn’t a tortured shoot by any stretch. They had their annoyances (like Forman refusing to show the cast dailies) and more serious trials (they found out halfway through production that William Redfield was dying of leukemia), but for the most part it was fun.
“We were very serious about the work, because Miloš was very serious. And we had the material, Kesey’s work, and the reverence for that. We were not frivolous about it. But we did have a ball doing it,” DeVito said, laughing.
Part of that is because they filmed on location at a real state hospital in Salem, Oregon. Everyone stayed in the same motel and would board the same bus in the morning to get to set. It would have been hard not to bond and even harder if they hadn’t.
“There was full commitment,” Douglas said. “That comes when you don’t go home at night to your own lives. We stopped for lunch on the first day and I saw Jack kind of push his tray away and go outside to get some air. I said, ‘Jack, you OK?’ He said, ’Who are these guys? Nobody breaks character! It’s lunch time and they’re all acting the same way!'”
Not disproving Nicholson’s point, DeVito remembers he and the cast even asked if they could just sleep in the hospital.
“They wouldn’t let us,” DeVito said. “The floor above us had some seriously disturbed people who had committed murder.”
The film will be in theaters again on July 13 and July 16 from Fathom Entertainment. It’s a new 4K restoration from the Academy Film Archive and Teatro Della Pace Films with an introduction by Leonard Maltin.
“It’s a gorgeous print and reminds me how good the sound was,” Douglas said.
DeVito thinks it, “holds up in a really big way, because Miloš really was paying attention to all great things in the screenplay and the story originally.”
Besides the shock of “holy Toledo, am I that old?” DeVito said that it was a treasure to be part of — and he continues to see his old friends, including Douglas, Lloyd and, of course, Nicholson, who played the protagonist, R.P. McMurphy.
One person Douglas thinks hasn’t gotten the proper attention for his contributions to “Cuckoo’s Nest” is producer Saul Zaentz, who died in 2014. His music company, Fantasy Records who had Creedence Clearwater Revival, funded the endeavor which started at a $1.6 million budget and ballooned to $4 million by the end. He was a gambler, Douglas said, and it paid off.
And whatever sour grapes might have existed between Douglas and his father, who played R.P. McMurphy on Broadway and dreamt of doing so on film, were perhaps over-exaggerated. It was ultimately important for their relationship.
“McMurphy is as good a part as any actor is going to get, and I’m now far enough in my career to understand maybe you have four, maybe five good parts, really great parts. I’m sure for dad that was one of them,” Douglas said.
“To not be able to see it through was probably disappointing on one side. On the other, the fact that his son did it and the picture turned out so good? Thank God the picture turned out. It would have been a disaster if it hadn’t."
Douglas added: “It was a fairy tale from beginning to end. I doubt anything else really came close to it. Even my Oscar for best actor years later didn’t really surpass that moment very early in my career.”
FILE - Michael Douglas, left, and Danny DeVito appear at the 5th Annual Reel Stories, Real Lives Benefit on April 7, 2016, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Rich Fury/Invision/AP, File)
FILE - Members of the cast and crew of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," winners of the Oscars for best director, best actor, best actress and best picture, from left, director Milos Forman, actor Jack Nicholson, actress Louise Fletcher and co-producer Michael Douglas, are shown at the Oscars on March 30, 1976. (AP Photo, File)
SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — As Chileans vote on Sunday, even detractors of ultra-conservative former lawmaker José Antonio Kast say the candidate whose radical ideas lost him the past two elections is now almost certain to become Chile’s next leader.
Kast’s meaningful lead in the polls over his rival in the presidential runoff, communist Jeannette Jara, shows how the hard-liner agitating for mass deportations of immigrants has seized the mantle of the traditional right in a country that once defined its post-dictatorship democratic revival with a vow to contain such political forces.
But much is also up for grabs about Chile’s political direction.
Kast's claim to a popular mandate depends on his margin of victory on Sunday over Jara, the center-left governing party candidate who narrowly beat him in the first round of elections last month.
Although various right-wing parties won around 70% of the vote in that election, substantial support for a populist center-right candidate who described himself as an alternative to Kast’s “fascism” revealed that, between the contrasting ideologies of the front-runners, sit hundreds of thousands of centrist voters with no real representation.
“Both are too extreme for me,” said Juan Carlos Pileo, 44, who plans to cast a blank ballot Sunday, as voting is now mandatory in Chile’s elections. “I can’t trust someone who says she’s a communist to be moderate. And I can’t trust someone who exaggerates the amount of crime we have in this country and blames immigrants to be fair and respectful.”
It remains a question whether Kast, an admirer of U.S. President Donald Trump, can implement his more grandiose promises.
They include slashing $6 billion in public spending over just 18 months without eliminating social benefits, deporting over 300,000 immigrants in Chile with no legal status and expanding the powers of the army to fight organized crime in a country still haunted by Gen. Augusto Pinochet’sbloody military dictatorship from 1973 to 1990.
For one, Kast’s far-right Republican Party lacks a majority in Congress, meaning that he’ll need to negotiate with moderate right-wing forces that could bristle at those proposals, significantly shaping policy and his own legacy.
Political compromises could temper Kast’s radicalism, but also jeopardize his position with voters who expect him to deliver quickly on his law-and-order campaign promises.
At each campaign event, Kast has taken to ticking off the number of days remaining until Chile's March 11 presidential inauguration, warning they should get out before they'll "have to leave with just the clothes on their backs.”
Jorge Rubio, 63, a Chilean banker in downtown Santiago, the capital, said he's “also counting down the days.”
“That’s why we’re voting for Kast," he said.
As the pandemic shuttered borders, transnational criminal organizations like Tren de Aragua seized illegal migration routes to gain a foothold in Chile, long considered among Latin America's safest countries. Homicides hit a record high in 2022, the first year of President Gabriel Boric’s tenure.
Kast insists that Boric’s government is too soft on immigration and crime, which the far-right leader argues are connected although the data does not necessarily support his narrative. Boric’s approval rating has plummeted, standing now at just 30%.
Yet many say the firebrand former student protester who came to power in 2021 pledging to transform Chile's market-led economy, has risen to the occasion. Boric went from criticizing the use of police force on the campaign trial to pouring money into the security forces. He sent the military to reinforce Chile's northern border, stiffened penalties for organized crime and created the country's first public security ministry.
Chile's homicide rate is now falling, about on par with the rate in the United States. That has done nothing to change Chileans' feelings of profound insecurity.
In Libya, where fractious militias jostle for political power, over 70% of people feel safe walking alone at night, according to a recent Gallup survey of 144 countries.
In Chile, just 39% of people do, around the same as in Ecuador, which is now in the midst of a violent, drug-driven crime wave.
As Boric's former minister of labor, Jara became popular for passing some of the administration's most important welfare measures.
That matters little now. Voters' concerns have forced her to switch gears. She has vowed to toughen border security, register undocumented migrants, tackle money laundering and step up police raids.
But promises to restore law and order are more persuasive coming from an insurgent outsider who has made security a key part of his agenda for years.
“Kast has been smart and strategic in focusing on migration and security," said Lucía Dammert, a sociologist and Boric’s first chief of staff. “It has been very difficult for the Jara campaign to move him away from those issues.”
Learning from his previous two failed presidential runs, Kast has avoided topics that fire up his critics — such as his German-born father’s Nazi past, his nostalgia for Pinochet's dictatorship and his opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion.
When asked, Kast says only that his values remain the same. His supporters, including voters who previously spurned him over his social conservatism, now say that abstract human rights concerns come after their need for safety on the streets.
“It's not very nice to hear that he's going to separate immigrant children from their parents, it's sad, that's going to be a problem for me,” said Natacha Feliz, a 27-year-old immigrant from the Dominican Republic referring to a recent interview in which Kast said immigrant parents without legal status who didn’t self-deport would be obliged to hand their kids over to the state.
“But this is happening everywhere, not just in Chile. Let's just hope that our security situation improves."
Associated Press writer Nayara Batschke in Santiago, Chile, contributed to this report.
A voter casts his ballot during the presidential runoff election in Santiago, Chile, Sunday, Dec. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix)
Luis Soto prepares to vote in the presidential runoff election in Santiago, Chile, Sunday, Dec. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
Richard Ferreira, a Venezuelan residing in Chile, waits for polls to open during the presidential runoff election in Santiago, Sunday, Dec. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
Police guard the Mapocho station polling station during the presidential runoff election in Santiago, Chile, Sunday, Dec. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
Presidential candidate Jeannette Jara of the Unidad por Chile coalition addresses supporters during a rally ahead of the presidential runoff election in Santiago, Chile, Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
A man cycles past campaign ads for presidential candidate Jose Antonio Kast and Argentina's President Javier Milei reading in Spanish "Our future is in danger" ahead of the presidential runoff election in Santiago, Chile, Friday, Dec. 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
Presidential candidate Jose Antonio Kast of the Republican Party addresses supporters, from behind a protective glass panel, during a rally ahead of the runoff election in Temuco, Chile, Thursday, Dec. 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix)
A campaign banner reads in Spanish "Neither Jara nor Kast will make our lives better, don't vote, rebel and fight" ahead of the presidential runoff election in Santiago, Chile, Friday, Dec. 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
Presidential candidates Jose Antonio Kast of the Republican Party and Jeannette Jara of the Unity for Chile coalition shake hands during a debate ahead of runoff elections in Santiago, Chile, Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix)
